Thinking About Stereotypes Can Affect Your Performance

/via https://xkcd.com/385/

It turns out that just thinking about stereotypes can impair your performance — especially if it’s a stereotype about you. The emphasis here is critical to understanding how and why so much bulls**t has spread around “women suck at programming”, “men are logical, women are emotional” and so forth.

Roll the tape back to 1995 when a huge NIH study (•) showed that there were sex-based differences in spatial abilities, with men outperforming women by over one standard-deviation. The result was a plethora of follow-up studies trying to figure out whether this was due to testosterone, brain wiring, and whatnot.

Well, guess what — it turned out that this was all based on flawed research. A subtle flaw, mind you, based on expectations, but a flaw nevertheless.
In 2008 (why did it take so long?) folks at the University of Berlin did a follow-on study (••) where they “primed” the subjects by, effectively having the women imagining themselves to be stereotypical men (and vice versa).
The result?

Cohen’s d showed a pronounced gender difference emerging only in the femalepriming condition (d = .59), whereas it disappeared in the male priming condition (d = .01).

Translated to plain english, this says that the difference in spatial performance between men and women vanishes if the participants imagine themselves as stereotypical men for a wee bit before the test. 
That “one standard deviation in performance” that the NIH found? Gone.

STEREOTYPE THREAT
This type of behavior is called Stereotype Threat (•••). It’s not just techno-babble — it shows up when you look at what the brain is actually doing with an fMRI. It turns out that under threat conditions, the parts of the brain involved with negative thoughts and emotions light up way more than the ones that are associated with solving problems.

It’s a real thing, and has real consequences out there — you, literally, get less smart when working under “threat” conditions! Whats worse is that it affects you even more if you are operating under the influence of stereotypes (“women suck at math”).

RESOLVING THISAll that said, the good news is that this is — potentially — resolvable. From Johns et al.(••••)

women performed worse than men when the problems were described as a math test (and stereotype threat was not discussed), but did not differ from men in the problem-solving condition or in the condition in which they learned about stereotype threat.

In other words, a huge chunk of the effects can be eliminated by informing test-takers that negative stereotypes have nothing to do with actual abilities, and that stereotype-threats are, basically, bulls**t.

So, the next time you hear somebody (or yourself!) utter a sentence from the Stereotype Threat Playbook (“Math is hard”; “he is doing well despite his background” etc.), you should realize that this is exactly the type of situation that negatively affects people.

Always keep this in mind. It is this background radiation that is the killer, and which needs to be eliminated.

(•) “Magnitude of sex differences in spatial abilities: a meta-analysis and consideration of critical variables.” — by Voyer et al.

(••) “Where are the Gender Differences? Male Priming Boosts Spatial Skills in Women” — by Ortner et al.

(•••) “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Test Performance of African-Americans” by Steele et al.

(••••) “Knowing is half the battle: teaching stereotype threat as a means of improving women’s math performance” — by Johns et al.